FEDERATIONS:INTERNATIONAL sporting federations are being put under pressure by the London 2012 organisers to release unwanted Olympic tickets in a bid to end the controversy about empty seats.
Between 5 per cent and 15 per cent of tickets for each event are allocated to the international sporting federations and their national federation memberships.
In many cases so far, however, they have not used some or all of their allocations, or used them only for a short period of time because their nations were not represented in particular rounds.
The problem has to be dealt with “by negotiation”, said London 2012 director Sir Charles Allen because the ticket allocations are part of the deal made with the International Olympic Council.
Both he and the British culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, defended Olympic sponsors, such as Coca-Cola, who were wrongly blamed by many for the problem when it first emerged.
Despite persistent allegations that they got the majority of the seats, sponsors, in fact, have 8 per cent of them, while national Olympic committees were given 1.2 million of the 8.8 million available. Five per cent of the total was reserved for athletes and officials.
In some cases, the sporting federations have not needed their tickets for the full duration of an event, so those are now being sold at a discounted price to the public.
However, they are only available to the 10,000 people with daily Olympic Park tickets, who watch the events on giant TV screens in a meadow created in the Lea Valley grounds.
“They’re proving incredibly popular so people in the park are able to get access to that and get into the venues and, as I say, there’s a lot of happy faces,” Mr Allen said.
Tickets which are not needed at all by the federations will be put for sale nightly on the London 2012 website, though complaints still exist about its operation.
Three thousand tickets were returned on Sunday for events yesterday, including 600 for the gymnastics, Mr Hunt declared.
“So, what we’re saying is if you’re not going to use them could we have as many as possible back because, of course, we’ve got lots of members of the public who would dearly love to go.
“We want to be completely upfront with the public, this is a negotiation, we don’t have a right to demand these back. In fact, contractually, these seats do belong to the (federations),” he went on.
Meanwhile, British prime minister David Cameron ridiculed a Conservative MP, Adam Burley, who had condemned last Friday’s opening ceremony as “leftie multicultural crap”.
“I did once say something about people who use Twitter, particularly politicians, and I think in this case I was absolutely spot on. I think what he said was completely wrong, an idiotic thing to say,” Mr Cameron said.
